Safwat Shehata, a man in his 40s from Upper Egypt’s Minya Governorate, stands outside the entrance of the emergency room at the Sheikh Zayed Hospital on the outskirts of Cairo. Inside, four of his relatives are receiving treatment for injuries sustained in Friday’s militant attack, in which gunmen ambushed Coptic Christians returning from a trip to the St. Samuel Monastery in Minya.

The assailants injured at least 20 people in the attack and killed seven more. Six of those killed were Shehata’s relatives, ranging in age from 12 to 55 years old.

At first, Safwat was unaware that his relatives were killed and injured in the attack — he did not even know they were visiting the monastery that day. “I saw news of the attack on the internet and I scrolled through the pictures on social media. I thought that the casualties were from [the governorate of] Sohag. I didn’t know that my cousins and their families were going on that day,” he says.

Seeing images of bodies covered in blood, Safwat asked God to have mercy on their souls. He kept monitoring news of the attack on Facebook until he received a call from a relative informing him that his cousin-in-law, Youssef Shehata, and five members of his family were dead.

“You must go and save the wounded in Cairo,” the relative told Safwat between cries. “The bodies are being buried here.”